Creating a page for your company using Facebook Timeline

Facebook’s new timeline format has been slowing rolling out over the past few months (I adopted in December to get an advanced handle on it). Sure enough, it’s now the way your company page is laid out. It’s fairly easy to update and reorganize if you already have a page, as you’ve been automatically transferred – but what if you don’t?

I’ve created several pages for recent clients and while it’s fairly straightforward, there are a few things to note:

You used to choose what page you wanted folks to land on – not anymore. Your option now is something called a sticky post – you pin it to the top of your newsfeed and there it stays – I find many folks are using it to direct viewers to their donor page, or placing show information there.

Building your audience – I humbly suggest you have something on your page for people to see before you invite them to like it. It’s similar to having a restaurant grand opening with no menu, or getting to the dreaded “under construction” page in a heavily promoted website. Start thoughtfully with your invites – don’t click indiscriminately. Choose people who really will like your page – quality likes – and therefore share it with others. Quantity will follow quality.

Photos are much bigger – especially your cover photo. This image is 850 x 315 pixels. Choose a good picture – have it ready and thought out before you post it: this is the equivalent of your Facebook billboard. (But remember, you are not allowed to use it for obvious advertising). There’s a lot more image real estate to work with now, which is a great thing – use it wisely. On that note, we’ve all been through the upload and wait to get the “image too small” message. Here’s a handy dandy cheat sheet from dreamgrow.com on various media sizes on Facebook.

It takes 30 likes gets you your vanity url – an important thing to have – rather than facebook.com/numbersandletters you will now have facebook.com/pagename. Much better for marketing and promotions.

On your admin panel, there’s a link called “use activity log” – it gives you a straight dated column of what’s been going on with your page chronologically. An excellent tool if you are trying to track ticket sales.

Insights are now readily apparent on your admin panel. This is what the marketing folks are looking for to show people – the stats – who’s liking, who’s talking, what the reach is to friends of friends. A marketer’s best friend when trying to correlate social media activity with real world action.

And finally – look at other pages. See what other companies are doing, what’s working, what’s not. I’m not saying slavishly copy or steal, but if there are good ideas out there use them.